Your post reminds me of the time Steven (now William) Regal really worked over Goldberg in a match on Nitro, whereas most Goldberg matches at the time were 30 second or less squashes. They still went to the typical “Goldberg wins” ending, though.
One of the matches with the longest extended shoot fight was the Vader vs Hansen match in Japan where Vaders orbital socket is broken by mistake in a pre match scuffle and he get pissed off and starts punching Hansen who then gets mad and starts punching back. It is almost four minutes before they get back to the actual match. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmK8mt4QWBg
Great link puddle! I never saw the whole match before. Those guys were collecting and cashing in a lot receipts all in the same match. Hansen and Vader were two of the stiffest wrestlers ever. Hansen supposedly hit too hard by accident because he was nearly blind and just misjudged distances. But both of them had reputations as just plain old badasses.
You probably already know this, but that’s sorta like the story of Bearcat Wright working for Roy Shire in the 1960s. I think Bearcat was supposed to be dropping the title, but he didn’t want to–so he no-showed the match. So, for his next match, Shire gave Bearcat a mystery opponent under a mask. He immediately recognized it was none other than Gene Lebell under the mask.
If you were a wrestler, and you had a list of other wrestlers that you wanted to definitely avoid in a shoot–Lebell would be on the short list. And Bearcat knew that if he stuck around, it would be one of two things: A quick, humiliating defeat, or a long, painful defeat. So, as the story goes, he high-tailed it.
I can’t finish that Vader match. As soon as they zoom in on his eye… ugh. I have a thing about eyes.
Well, I’m not saying I was fooled by a typical ‘planned’ wrestling match. But the ones I mentioned in my earlier post sure had the look and feel of an honest match. If they were acting, it was better acting than they ever did in any of their other matches.
It’s just that the match was there almost as an afterthought. I truly got the impression that the wrestlers were trying to out-wrestle each other, as if they had a bet as to who could really beat the other legit. They followed warnings from the referee pretty well, but it was like they didn’t even care that the audience was there.
All I know is the matches were very good, but seemed very out of place. Odd to see fairly well known wrestlers work such an authentic looking match one time, and then never see that caliber of skill and ability from them again.
Ah, so that’s where Daniel Bryan got the Lebell lock from. Cool.
I just read of an interview with Lou Thesz that mentioned that some people he wrestled would like to test him to see if he really was as good as people said. He said that the matches would become competitive, but that they always went through with the finish. It is possible you saw one of these matches if you are old enought.
Also, the old matches weren’t scripted the way they are now. In most cases either a nod to the winner ahead of the match, or in the case of champion nothing. The champion is always supposed to win unless something is arranged ahead of time. So it was up the wrestlers to decide what they would do in the ring throughout the match until the end, and I’m sure it became truly competitive at times.
Well, even today the level of scripting per match varies. Some have every moment worked out in advance, others just have a basic idea of what they’re going to do within the time they’ve been allotted. Usually one of the guys will “call” the match and basically be in charge of what they do when. Sometimes the crew will mess up and catch him telling the other guy what they’re going to do next on camera.
Yeah, the greats still call matches on the fly. They usually meet up beforehand to discuss which spots each one wants to do, but the rest of the match is worked as it goes. I believe the ref is the one keeping them on time for everything.
Well these days the refs have earpieces. In the old days it was the announcer/commentator/promoter who kept the only time, when to end it. Wrestling varied, but many promotions of old followed a code where the heels and faces could never be seen together in public. And public meant the locker room too. There used to be athletic commission officials wandering around, and even though they knew what was going on, if they actually witnessed preplanning, they could stop the match, that is until the promoter paid them off. So often wrestlers had to make it up as the match went along with no prior communication. Of course most wrestlers had faced most other wrestlers many times before. Their rematches were just a way of refining the act.